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The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region presents advanced
anthropological theorizing of culture in an important regional
setting. Not a static entity, the transborder region is peopled by
ever-changing groups who face the challenges of social inequality:
political enforcement of privilege, economic subordination of
indigenous communities, and organized resistance to domination.The
book, influenced by the work of Eric Wolf and senior editor Carlos
Velez-Ibanez, centers on the greater Mexican North/U.S. Southwest,
although the geographic range extends farther. This tradition, like
other transborder approaches, attends to complex and fluid cultural
and linguistic processes, going beyond the classical modern
anthropological vision of one people, one culture, one language.
With respect to recent approaches, however, it is more deeply
social, focusing on vertical relations of power and horizontal
bonds of mutuality. Velez-Ibanez and Heyman envision this region as
involving diverse and unequal social groups in dynamic motion over
thousands of years. Thus the historical interaction of the
U.S.-Mexico border, however massively unequal and powerful, is only
the most recent manifestation of this longer history and common
ecology. Contributors emphasize the dynamic "transborder"
quality-conflicts, resistance, slanting, displacements, and
persistence-in order to combine a critical perspective on unequal
power relations with a questioning perspective on claims to bounded
simplicity and perfection. The book is notable for its high degree
of connection across the various chapters, strengthened by internal
syntheses from notable border scholars, including Alejandro Lugo
and Roberto Alvarez. In the final section, Judith Freidenberg draws
general lessons from particular case studies, summarizing that
"access to valued scarce resources prompts the erection of human
differences that get solidified into borders," dividing and
limiting, engendering vulnerabilities and marginalizing some
people. At a time when understanding the U.S.-Mexico border is more
important than ever, this volume offers a critical anthropological
and historical approach to working in transborder regions.
Contributors: Amado Alarcon, Robert R. Alvarez, Jr., Miguel
Diaz-Barriga, Margaret Dorsey, Judith Noemi Freidenberg, Ruth
Gomberg-Munoz, James B. Greenberg, Josiah Heyman, Jane H. Hill,
Sarah Horton, Alejandro Lugo, Luminita-Anda Mandache, Corina
Marrufo, Guillermina Gina Nunez-Mchiri, Anna Ochoa O'Leary, Luis F.
B. Plascencia, Lucero Radonic, Diana Riviera, Thomas E. Sheridan,
Kathleen Staudt, Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez.
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